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S-ATA or P-ATA

D

ding5550123

Senior member
I wamted to get a raid arry but i can't decide between S-ata and P-ATA. It would run XP PRO Sp2. Wich would be better?

(P-ATA 133, S-ATA 150)
 
Originally posted by: Cerb
SATA has thinner cables. That is all you need to know.
Click to expand...

Is it?

SATA has thinner cables, sure. And better peak theoretical throughput, not that it matters.

A lot of motherboards include SATA RAID support on board, which is handy to some and useless to most. The right drive/motherboard combination would give you little bonuses like NCQ, which to typical users is worth about nothing.

But if you're installing Windows XP (and lots of people do), doing so on an SATA drive often means fiddling with drivers (floppy drives still have a use, after all). And some motherboards misbehave (still) when faced with both SATA and ATA hard drives, which can take a little doing to iron out.

SATA has some advantages. But it also has disadvantages. Both are worth noting. For an average user, the most salient differences are the cables (which may mean better cooling, or may mean being able to place drives farther from the motherboard, or very often may mean nothing), and the sometime quirks of installing Windows to an SATA drive. Which makes it pretty much a wash.

@OP: why do you want a RAID array?
 
I'd certainly do SATA on a new RAID setup. Less cable clutter and some drives like the recent Hitachi 7K80 SATA 300 drive are simply amazing in RAID-0 at the price. Don't know about longevity of the drive in RAID service yet though. Be aware that RAID-0 performance improvements are limited to operations that are sequential-read/write-heavy like booting and loading programs. Single drives are better at random read/writes

There is info over on the front end of the AT site and at StorageReview.com that can help you determine if basic RAID is worth it as against the added risk.

.bh..
 
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